On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 08:12:42AM -0500, Roger Racine wrote:
"[..]
What does Java have that Ada doesn't? [..]"
Inheritance anomalies. Nondeterminism. Incompatible attempts at JVMs
implemented by Sun as reported in an attempt at a VHDL grammar with
JavaCC.
"[..]
1) Graphical approaches for flight control applications. Controls
engineers have written their algorithms in diagrams since the 60s. If
those diagrams can be automatically made into code, it saves a fair amount
of effort. Thus, Simulink, Matlab, etc."
Hardware design matured from unwieldly CAD schematics to text-like VHDL
and Verilog.
"2) Libraries. For guidance, navigation, and other applications that work
in floating point (science applications in general), Matlab is an excellent
example of an excellent design environment. Why? Because it has a large
number of tools available to analyze the data coming out of the
program. It is essentially a great code completion editor, compiler, and
debugger in one integrated tool. It completes code by adding data
declarations (I have never met a GN&C engineer who liked to declare their
variables. "They are all double precision floating point anyway; why can't
the system create them for me"). It takes the code ("M" files, in a
proprietary programming language) and compiles it. And then the debugger
allows the code to be executed using all sorts of data analysis routines.
[..]"
MATLAB is extremely weakly typed: I have seen someone with a doctorate who
annually lectures the same material in digital signal processing
accidentally let MATLAB (which provides no help in resolving the matter)
perform a one dimensional Fast Fourier Transform on a two dimensional
array which needed a 2D FFT.